Abstract

SARS-CoV-2, more than a host, is an intruder, an intruder with unimaginable power: it enters our tissues, weakens our immune system and damages our lungs and respiration. But it is a creature that has entered our social imagination before: our fears, reflections, information and speculations. Its "ghostly" character is now inserted not only as a form of threat to life itself, but as a poison that seeks to undermine the Aristotelian zoon politikón. The intruder lurks both in the biological dimension of our body and in the social dimension of our life together. There is something symptomatic about the virus, which has revealed a problem in the circuits of Western thought: mistrust of objectivity protocols, the rise of Salvationist interpretations and conspiracy theories, suspicion of all scientific data and interpretation, and the disdain for the dialogical rhetoric of the argument.